Closing the Customer Service Channel to answer your customer complaints on Social Media? Think twice before you shut it off…!
With the social media everywhere, people are more concerned about their image on social media.
Days are gone when social media was just to grow your network and get connected to people whom you may know through common connections. Our estimate is that at least half of the world is connected at the 30th level connections.
Well individual connections and networking are the days of the past. With social media ads coming into the picture, businesses have started focusing on creating digital branding themselves. While positioning their brands on social media, businesses need to take care of several aspects, like their brand story, their identity, their target audience etc., Besides the brand creation there is one important aspect that business owners must take care of – Brand Management.
Creating a brand itself isn’t enough. Maintaining the brand, ensuring the brand reputation is in place and protecting it from any negative impacts, becomes essential for the business, its investors and the people working for the brand. Branding is in-fact larger than what is actually perceived by people. It is an authority that is carried with elegance and charm.
Pre-sales, sales and post-sales lifecycle is the first touch point for branding. This is the life cycle where your customers touch and feel your brand. And post-sale brand related activities play an essential role to establish trust and build loyal customers for your brand. And many business in B2C segment, seem to ignore it, to see the consequences that fall after. Many consumer brands tend to forget this basic rule of consumerism -“Praise in public, criticize in private.”
In the social media era, consumers look for a quick turn around for their problems or issues. A decade ago, sending an email or raising a customer support ticket were the brand channels open in the post-sale lifecycle. People waited for the replies to come and brands ensured the customer queries are replied back within their set SLAs. But lately, with brands creating presence on social media, customers tend to reach the brands on social media channels anticipating for a quicker resolution to their problems. While some brands follow an open channel strategy, some follow the close channel strategy.
Brands like Zivame, Big-basket have used their brand social media handles to address their customer’s needs. This open channel strategy though helps them instantly respond to their customer’s queries, they also put the brand at risk. Where as another consumer centric e-commerce giant, Flipkart follows a mixed strategy. It has a separate social media handles for branding and support. For customer support or complaints that need deeper research, they redirect the customers to write to them on a private chat, than answering them right on the social media.
What does this tell us?
Branding is a sensitive aspect. When handled with care, will yield loyal customer base. However, when mis-handled, it pulls out the roots and removes it from the picture.
How to confront when your angry customers complain on social media?
Customers get frustrated or mostly reach out on social media under two circumstances: a. When they don’t know where to reach out to when they have a problem with their order. b. When they have repeatedly tried reaching out on e-mail and customer support and have not got their issue resolved.
While customers coming from Case A, are not complex to be handled. If they are provided with the right answers, they are likely to leave the handle with a positive review.
Customers coming from Case B, are complex cases. They have been forced to the social media forum as they felt they weren’t heard. Handling these cases, need efficient social media handlers, who speak to the customer keeping the brand in mind. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
– [ ] Be respectful to your customers
– [ ] Having a softer tone in your messages, shall calm down your customers.
– [ ] Request them for a private chat to solve their issue.
– [ ] Request for an opportunity to investigate the case and provide speedier resolution. If you have promised this, better do it immediately.
The Bottom Line:
Building a brand takes a huge amount of work and comes with emotions attached. The best way to protect the brand is to make sure it is maintained and managed well. Reputation of a brand reveals the culture of the company, let the culture percolate to every consumer touchpoint.
We at iBrandLabs offer experienced customer service teams who understand brands, customers and customer service. If you would like to know more about us, you can contact us right away.